The new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is ordering an investigation into whether NPR and PBS violated government rules by recognizing financial sponsors on the air — a breach that could provide justification for lawmakers to end public funding for the stations.
Chairman Brendan Carr wrote in a letter to NPR and PBS on Wednesday that the stations operate as noncommercial broadcast organizations, but that they may be airing “announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr wrote.
He concludes: “For your awareness, I will be providing a copy of this letter to relevant Members of Congress because I believe this FCC investigation may prove relevant to an ongoing legislative debate. In particular, Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming. For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.”
NPR defended its practice of underwriting, saying it “complies with federal regulations.”
“We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules,” Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, told the New York Times. “We have worked for decades with the F.C.C. in support of noncommercial educational broadcasters who provide essential information, educational programming, and emergency alerts to local communities across the United States.”
PBS told the Times that it was proud of its “noncommercial educational programming,” and works “diligently to comply with the F.C.C.’s underwriting regulations.”
Two Democratic FCC commissioners released statements expressing concern about Carr’s investigation. Commissioner Anna Gomez accused Carr of attempting to “weaponize the power of the FCC.” Carr, a longtime Republican member of the commission, was chosen in November by President Donald Trump to lead the agency.
Carr’s investigation comes as several Republican lawmakers have introduced bills in Congress that would defund public media. Representative Jim Banks (R., Ind.) authored the Defund NPR Act, while Senator John Kennedy (R., La.) and Representative Scott Perry (R., Pa.) have introduced the No Propaganda Act.
NPR has claimed just 1 percent of its funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But this has been debunked, as the 1 percent represents only direct funding, not the larger portion of its revenue NPR receives from local public radio stations, which use federal funds to purchase programming produced by NPR. For example, in 2021, NPR reported $90 million in revenue from “contracts from customers,” a substantial portion of its $279 million overall funding.
National Review‘s editors called last year to defund NPR, saying it has “every right to operate as a left-wing propaganda outlet masquerading as a legitimate news organization. But it is not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money.”
The editorial was published in response to an essay from Uri Berliner, an NPR veteran of 25 years, who wrote an essay about the network’s evolution from having a liberal bent to having an outright ideological bias for the Free Press on his way out the door.
He noted several incidents of bias, including with its coverage of the Russian-collusion story — and later silence on the Mueller report’s conclusion that there was no collusion — alongside its refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story or the Covid lab leak theory in 2020.
Furthermore, NPR, like other institutions, was inspired to impose a DEI framework organization-wide after the racial reckoning of 2020. “Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace,” Berliner recounted.